Cleveland Officer Says He Shot Tamir Rice After Fake Gun Was Pulled

Officer Timothy Loehmann, the rookie Cleveland patrolman who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year, saw the boy “reaching into his waistband” and “pulling the gun out” before firing his own weapon, the officer said in a statement released Tuesday by the local prosecutor’s office.

The statement is the first public accounting of the Nov. 22, 2014, shooting from Officer Loehmann, who shot Tamir, who was black, within seconds of spotting him outside a neighborhood recreation center. The gun Officer Loehmann said Tamir was holding turned out to be a replica, and Tamir, who the officer said appeared to be an adult, was not yet a teenager.

Cuyahoga County grand jurors are said to be meeting to consider criminal charges in the case, which has prompted protests across the country and raised questions about how the police use force and interact with African-Americans. Timothy J. McGinty, the county prosecutor, has not said when a decision on charges will be made.

On Monday, Officer Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback, who was driving the cruiser, read their statements to grand jurors, said Steve Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, the union representing rank-and-file officers. Mr. Loomis said the officers invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and did not answer questions.

Henry Hilow, a lawyer for Officer Loehmann, said that the statements were given on Monday to a sheriff’s investigator, but he declined to comment on whether his client had appeared before the grand jury.

In his signed statement, Officer Loehmann frequently invokes phrases from his police training. “We are trained to get out of the cruiser because ‘the cruiser is a coffin,’ ” he said. At another point, he said, “We are taught to get behind the cruiser for cover.”

The officers had been responding to a call of a male waving a gun in a park. The dispatcher did not relay a 911 caller’s cautions that the person was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun was “probably fake.” In his statement, Officer Loehmann said he had feared Tamir would run inside the recreation center.

“It’s unfortunate; it’s tragic,” Mr. Loomis, the union president, said in an interview. “Those police officers approached him the way that they did in good faith because they did not want someone that was armed to run into that rec center.”

The shooting was captured on surveillance video, and the footage has circulated widely. Some have said the recording should be grounds for criminal charges against the police, and have questioned whether Officer Loehmann had time to yell, “Show me your hands,” as he says he did. But others have said the camera showed the police acting reasonably in a potentially dangerous situation, noting that Tamir’s arms move as Officer Garmback pulls the cruiser within feet of him.

Three independent reports commissioned by Mr. McGinty’s office found that Officer Loehmann acted reasonably. But last week, lawyers for the Rice family submitted two reports from outside investigators that criticized the officers’ tactics and said that the shooting was unjustified.

On Monday, two of Tamir’s siblings and his mother, Samaria, also testified to the grand jury, according to the family’s lawyers.

Jonathan S. Abady, one of the lawyers, said in a statement Tuesday that the officers’ accounts “in no way establish that their conduct in shooting Tamir Rice was reasonable or justified.”

“Allowing defendant police officers to submit unsworn statements in response to grand jury subpoenas that call for their live testimony is again a stunning irregularity further tainting these proceedings,” said Mr. Abady, who has repeatedly called for Mr. McGinty to turn the case over to a special prosecutor.

Joseph Frolik, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, disputed some of Mr. Abady’s claims Tuesday night. “No witnesses, including these police officers, were permitted to give unsworn statements to the grand jury,” he said in a statement.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Officer Says He Shot Boy After Fake Gun Was Pulled . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe